We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A few days after the recent election, whilst walking down the street near Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, I noticed this sticker & my heart leapt with joy. With enormous regret, I had just voted Tory as I live in what was the most marginal Labour seat in the UK (20 vote Labour majority), and it did indeed turn blue by a narrow margin (150 vote Tory majority). Suddenly I did not feel so bad about voting ‘Conservative’.
But upon closer examination, I realised that far from being a Conservative sticker, it was without doubt propaganda designed to produce the opposite reaction to the one I experienced. Not hard to understand the thinking, as to people who produced this sticker, it was inconceivable that anyone actually wanted to see the NHS privatised. Indeed, I do not either, I want to see it abolished completely, but I would settle for genuine privatisation 😉
With the greatest regret, I felt I had no reasonable option but to vote Tory today. I live in a Labour super-marginal (Kensington) & as BXP has zero chance here, I had to vote against the anti-Semitic Marxist party.
I am going to drown my sorrows.
If you want to wear a poppy, then do so. If you do not, then again, so be it. If liberty is to mean anything, then it means the right not to wear a poppy and the dead of two world wars doubtless wouldn’t have cared overmuch either way – being somewhat more mature than their descendants.
– Longrider
Regardless of the opinions of Boris, if fusion comes on line in the middle of the attempts by the likes of the Rebellion to turn the western world into a weakened communist hive that the East will invade, high profile teenagers will likely be exposed as the anti-progress communists they are rather than environmentalists.
A certain teenager wants the West to emit less carbon so the East, who already emit over 60% of if, can emit more carbon. Check out her TED talk – she says it out loud (and much of the rest of the manifesto of the people who switched to Green politics in the 80s and early 90s after their preferred ism failed).
– the delightfully pseudonymous BeamUpDenied casting his or her pearls before the Gadarene swine on the Guardian
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan aims to change the way Japanese names are written in English by putting the family name first, the same way they are written in Japanese, in a triumph for conservatives keen to preserve traditional ways in a fast-changing world. Education Minister Masahiko Shibayama proposed the change to Cabinet ministers on Friday and the government will now study how to implement it, the top government spokesman said […] Foreign Minister Taro Kono raised the suggestion in May saying foreign media should write the prime minister’s name in the traditional way – Abe Shinzo.
Shinzo Abe can fuck right off, because that is not correct when using English. Follow your own heathen customs when using Japanese, old chap, but no government gets to decide how English is used, that sort of bullshit only happens in France and Japan 😛
I commend this to samizdata readers, one in a series by Tim Worstall apparently:
Modern Monetary Theory is, in one sense, just reality. In the other and more important discussion MMT is a simple ignorance of the original question being asked.
Hit the link, read the whole thing.
In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing.
– Economist Assar Lindbeck, which seems a timely reminder in view of this absurdity. Some actually take the view it is worse than bombing.
I have a friend, let’s call her Karen. Karen bootstrapped several Portland businesses, including a coffee shop. She walks in one day and the barista, who is trans, says she had a man come in earlier wearing a MAGA cap and is she obliged to serve people like him? Karen asks, did he say something to you? No, says the barista, but he’s a white supremacist. Karen tells her, first, you don’t know that, and second, you cannot discriminate based on the way someone is dressed. And that, Karen thinks, is that, but no, the barista relays the story to another barista we will call Jen, who goes onto Facebook and posts, “My boss Karen is a Nazi.” Karen learns of this while she is on vacation. She calls her manager and tells her to get Jen into the office. Jen may intuit as much, as when the manager says she needs to speak with her, Jen gets on the floor behind the espresso bar and curls into a fetal position. And you might think, if anyone should maybe not be in customer service, it’s Jen, but no, people prove sympathetic to her and the other barista’s fears and start an online inquisition and can Karen prove she is not a Nazi? And should she not be more concerned with the safety of her employees than some random Republican wanting a cup of coffee?
– Nancy Rommelmann, from ‘Portlandization: It can happen to a place near you‘
Samizdata is a site that writes about things from a primarily libertarian perspective (which means different things to different people, of course). But the issue firmly wedged in the minds of many people here is not a libertarian/non-libertarian issue, it is political, and it has split the samizdatistas much as it has split the UK.
Brexit.
Samizdata needs to get back to writing the kind of things it has always done, and will continue to do, but that does not mean the overtly political stuff is not worth saying… just not here. Not on samizdata. After much pondering, I have decided it just isn’t what this site should be about.
And that is why we now have The Great Realignment, an overtly political site in its very early days for all the various things that do not really fit on samizdata. It is not a replacement, it is a fork in our particular road. I believe that we are now entering a period in which many of the assumptions that have underpinned the UK’s political order are no longer true, but the politics we see have not yet adjusted to this uncertain half-glimpsed future. This is what we will be discussing, with a UK focus, but we may well look at similar realignments elsewhere.
Check it out.
Government crowds out productive research by betting on the wrong horses—those who seek funding by dipping their hands in the public till. As Ridley puts it, “If the government spends money on the wrong kind of science, it tends to stop people working on the right kind of science.” Before you cheer for politicians promising medical breakthroughs, realise their actions may prevent the discovery of cancer cures.
– Barry Brownstein
John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew non-stop across the Atlantic in a modified Vickers Vimy, taking off in Newfoundland, Canada and making an incommodious but non-fatal landing in Connemara, Ireland.
I was walking down a London street today and came upon a reminder that the reason Donald Trump is visiting the UK is not entirely about current affairs. And whatever you think of him personally, it is worth remembering why he is here.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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